Leaders: You Can Look Successful While Your Soul Cracks

The scariest leadership moments aren’t always public failures. Sometimes they come after your biggest “wins,” when the room is full, the work is growing, and everyone thinks you’re fine, then your body tells the truth in the dark. I share the night a powerful service ended with a panic attack and the slow realisation that my problem wasn’t just my schedule, it was my identity and the system I was living inside of.

We talk about the “vineyard within” from Song of Solomon and how easy it is to tend everyone else’s life while your inner world goes dry. I name the modern Babylon of hustle culture and performance-based Christianity: when busy gets called faithful, exhausted gets called committed, and rest starts to feel like losing value. If you’re a pastor, entrepreneur, ministry leader, or parent carrying responsibility, you’ll recognise the low-grade anxiety that never fully turns off and the quiet fear that your calling might be costing you your peace or your family.

From there, I tell the story of stepping off the treadmill, sitting by a backyard fire pit, and learning to receive the love of God without proving anything. We unpack rest as worship, Jesus as the blueprint for sustainable spiritual leadership, and why Scripture can say “strive for rest” without contradiction. I also reframe Noah’s story through a detail most people miss: Noah means rest, and grace comes before blueprints.

If this hits home, share it with a tired leader, subscribe for more conversations on sustainable Christian leadership, and leave a review so more people can find a place to breathe.

Transcript

Opening Questions For Weary Leaders

SPEAKER_00 0:06

What if the life you're building is slowly costing you the very things that you care about the most? What if your calling is quietly draining your peace? What if your leadership is producing results on the outside, but something on the inside of you is starting to break? Because there are moments in life when everything looks successful on the outside, but internally something's off. Something's not right. And the hardest part is no one sees it. Not your audience, not your friends, not even the people closest to you. Because from the outside, it looks like you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. You're looking like purpose in motion. You look like someone who has it together. You look like someone walking in their calling. And that's exactly where I found myself. On the outside, everything. On the inside, everything was falling apart. Guys, welcome to the Shepherd's Tent. I'm your host, Mark Casto. This is a place for weary leaders to remember who they are. This podcast is for leaders, not just in churches, but in businesses, ministries, and homes, for people who carry responsibility, for people who care deeply, for people who want to build something meaningful without losing themselves in the process. Because, guys, the reality is we live in a culture driven by hustle and performance and constant pressure. Many leaders are quietly carrying more than they were ever meant to carry. And somewhere along the way, the pressure to produce begins to crowd out the peace that we were meant to live in. Guys, this podcast exists to call you back, back to clarity, back to rest, back to a way of living that can actually sustain your life. So I want you to take a deep breath. I want you to step out of the noise, and I want you to come sit for a while inside the shepherd's tent. Guys, let's begin here. I want to take you back to the night I'll never forget. It was a Saturday night, about 11:30 p.m. The service had just ended. Everything went amazing. People were engaged. The room was full. Man, I'm telling you, the move of the spirit took place that night. And from the outside, it looked like revival. I mean, just amazing, amazing. Um momentum, even. And I believed that. I believed that I was walking in success, in purpose, in what I was called to do. I had a family that loved me, a growing ministry. Opportunities that I had once prayed for on my knees were now becoming a reality. I was married with three kids. I was traveling the nation preaching, and our ministry at home had exploded from just like six people to hundreds of people weekly, thousands coming to our conferences. Guys, this was prophecy fulfilled. This were this was dreams coming true. Another West Virginia boy that had escaped the mountains of obscurity to change the world. And I remember thinking, this is it. Like this is what it's supposed to look like. But what I didn't realize was that something beneath the surface had been building for a long time. I got back to where I was staying at the hotel that night. Everything was quiet and out of nowhere, my heart started racing. My chest tightened, and I can remember my breathing getting shallow. And I, and this thought came to came into my mind that I couldn't shake. They're going to find you dead in this room tomorrow. That's not quite the way I had imagined the afterglow of such a powerful service. Didn't make sense, but it felt completely real. The next week I was sitting in a cardiologist's office at 25 years old, only to discover that my heart issue was much deeper than the physical organ. I was dealing with anxiety. And in that moment, I realized something that I didn't want to admit. I wasn't okay, not even close. So the strange part was my life looked like the dream. I was doing what I believed I was called to do. Everything on the outside says you're doing great, Mark. But internally, something was deeply off. I had stopped flying because of fear. So I was driving to every preaching engagement. I couldn't travel alone because if I was left to silence, my mind would just torment me and my sleep was at a minimum. And each morning began with a sore jawl where I had been clenching my teeth all through the night. I was self-diagnosing myself with every feeling that seemed abnormal in my body, constantly bracing for the worst. Thousands in the meeting would run to the altars, tears running down their face with reports of healing and deliverances everywhere we went. Yet I was numb. My devotion was no longer about intimacy because the pressure to bring something fresh to God's people, sometimes six times a week on the road and at home, had become my responsibility. The ministry dream that I always had was becoming a nightmare. And here's the thing that nobody tells you. How could this be happening to me? I was a, some called me a prophetic evangelist, a pastor, a man of God. So the questions that I started asking is was this warfare? Maybe a thorn in my flesh? But what I discovered was this was worse than a demon. It was me. I was addicted to ministry, enslaved to the applause of man. And I could not escape the treadmill of performance. And this is the sad result of being thrust into ministry at 18 years old because of noticeable gifts instead of being established in the gospel and rooted in the love of Abba. So I want to take a moment and just read a verse to you that just was so powerful to me back in the fall of 2016 when the Lord began to really reveal himself to me and uh as reveal the gospel and reveal himself as someone who loved me. And I just didn't know what to do with that because I grew up in Pentecostal legalism all my entire life. And so in the fall of 2016, my spiritual father said, we're just gonna hang out in the Song of Solomon for the next three months and we're just gonna read through it. And so I began to read Song of Songs, and I'm thinking to myself, man, this is crazy. Like, what it, what it, what am I gonna do in this book? I've never read the Song of Solomon to save my life. Like, what is this? But when I got into the very first chapter, Song of Songs, chapter one, verse six, I was sitting in my fire pit in my backyard in South Carolina, and I read this verse. My angry brothers coiled with me and appointed me guardian of their ministry vineyards, yet I have not tended the vineyard within. Guys, the first time I read that line, oh man, I couldn't breathe because that was me. I had spent years tending everyone else's vineyard at the expense of my vineyard within. My gospel was fragile because I didn't know life apart from the treadmill of performance. Who was Marc Castro without a microphone in a pulpit? I didn't have a clue. And looking back now, I can see it clearly. The issue wasn't that I was leading, the issue was how I was living. Somewhere along the way, I started tending everything around me while neglecting what was happening in me. I was constantly pouring out, but I wasn't receiving. I was giving everyone the wine while my own cup was completely empty. And eventually, your soul cannot sustain that pace. The happy man that my wife married was now just a shell of a man, crumbling under the cares of ministry. I was unable to receive the love of God because I had been introduced to ministry before I was truly established and introduced to him. Guys, the reality is many of you have felt this. Maybe not a panic attack, but you've definitely felt the pressure. You've definitely felt that low-level anxiety that never fully turns off. That feeling that you should be doing more, you should be further along, you should be growing faster, you're you're building something, but you've got this quiet, nagging feeling that you're also losing something. And even when you stop, you don't actually feel at rest because internally you're still carrying it. Maybe you've told yourself, this is just a season. You've even told your wife that. You've told your kids that it's just a season. I'll slow down when the project launches, I'll rest when the kids get older, I'll breathe when things calm down. But what if it's not a season? What if it's a way of living that's unsustainable? What if the pace that you're running at was never designed for you to run at permanently? So I want to ask you something. And I want you to sit with it. Is your leadership costing you your soul? Is your calling costing you your family? Because if the answer is yes, something is off, and we need to talk about it. So here's what I began to understand. My problem wasn't just my schedule, it was my identity. And really, it goes beyond identity. It's also the system I was living inside of. The Bible has a name for the system that we've all been swimming in. It's called Babylon. Now, when most people hear that word, they think gold and jewels. But here's what's fascinating about the actual city of Babylon historically. Okay, it was located in an arid, flat desert. No forests, no mines, no rock to build with, not even rainfall to raise crops. Yet through sheer human effort, through the most incredible engineering of its time, they diverted rivers, they built dams, and they created fertile land in the middle of a barren desert. And the spirit of Babylon said, look at what we built. Look what we can do without God. And guys, that spirit is alive today. Babylon represents the hustle culture of today, the belief that if you just grind hard enough, if you just hustle long enough, if you just produce enough, you'll finally arrive. And here's what Babylon does to you: it re-identifies you, it disconnects you from who God says you are and rebuilds your identity around what you do. Guys, you know this is happening when the first question that you ask someone is, what do you do? Not who are you, not what brings you, uh what causes you to come alive, but what do you produce? Because Babylon has successfully domesticated us. And it worked on me. Somewhere along the way, my value became tied to what I produced, what I built, what I accomplished, what people thought of me. And when that happens, rest feels uncomfortable. Because if your value is tied to your output, then stopping feels like losing value. So you keep going, even when you're tired, even when something feels off, you keep producing because you don't know how to stop. And friend, that's the trap. And I was caught in it. So let me say something clearly to you. And I want you to hear this because a lot of what we call faithfulness today is actually just exhaustion with spiritual language around it. We've normalized busy equal equaling faithfulness. Exhausted equals committed and productive equals effective. And we've stopped questioning it our pace and we've stopped questioning our way of life. We applaud growth in ministry over personal growth and devotion. We celebrate leaders who's grinding while the leader who's resting is questioned. We look to other leaders and heroes only to discover that they're reaching the world while losing the spark in their marriages and connection with their children. And we call that success. Guys, we have to stop calling it success. We have to stop calling it faithfulness. There's a difference between carrying a cross and carrying something that you were never meant to carry. Guys, God does not need your exhaustion to accomplish his will. Let me say that one more time. God does not need your exhaustion. He never asked for it. Here's what he actually said: He said, Come to me, all you who are weary, not push harder, not the anointing gets stronger when you burn out. He said, Come to me, friend, because busyness is not a virtue, it's a vice. It's our vice of our time. And it's time that we name it. Now, let me pause here for a second because some of you listening don't just feel tired. You feel called. And that's the reality of where we're at. Um, is guys, you feel like the Lord has put a message in you that there's something that you are to share, something for you to create, but maybe you've been stuck trying to figure it out. How do I build this without burning out? Well, that's exactly why I created Long Path Creator Academy. It's where I help leaders take the message inside of them and build it into something sustainable, not through hustle, not through pressure, but through clarity, structure, and a model that actually works long term. So, guys, if your message matters, then it should support your life, not consume it. So if that resonates with you, I've got a link in the description of this video below. Make sure you go to marcasto.co backslash inner dash circle. I'd love to get you in there, see what we're doing, and help you start building something that reflects both your calling and your life. Now, let's jump back in. Guys, after that panic attack, I finally said yes to the most terrifying thing that I had ever done. I resigned from the ministry that I helped birth. I canceled my full traveling itinerary. I stepped off the treadmill and I sat in South Carolina with no plan, only an invitation. An invitation to recover the life of proximity to Jesus. Now, I'll be honest with you, in those early days, I did not know what rest even looked like. I tried to read the word, but my mind was still looking for a sermon. I tried to pray, but if I sat still long enough, I'd fall asleep. Religion wouldn't even let me admit that I needed rest. So eventually I found myself outside. I'd built a fire pit in our backyard. And in the fall of 2016, that simple fire pit became an altar. And that's, again, I mentioned this earlier, but my spiritual father gave what I believe now was a divine instruction. Sit alone three months, bathe yourself in the Song of Solomon. And honestly, my first reaction was the Song of Solomon for three months? Eight chapters? Are you kidding me? But the reality is I had nothing to lose. So every morning, weather permitting, I'd start a fire, set with my Bible, and a book called The Sacred Journey by Brian Simmons, which was a commentary on the Song of Solomon. And I would read a book. I started reading Song of Solomon, a book that I had dismissed my entire spiritual journey. And I found my story within its pages. I found the Shulamite overworked, exhausted, tending everyone else's vineyard with a complete loss of tenderness and zero confidence. Her story was my story. And what happened next changed everything. I closed my eyes one morning by that fire and I went into an encounter with the Good Shepherd. And he was walking toward me with his hand outstretched, and he said, Come take a walk with me. And I looked away in this vision, this encounter, and I saw my vineyard overgrown, full of thorns, absent of color. And I looked back to back at Jesus and I'm like pointing at the mess of my vineyard. And to my surprise, he didn't change the invitation. He said it again, come walk with me. So I took his hand and we began to walk. And as we walked, I told him everything we needed to fix so my garden could be presentable. And I just remember as I'm like kind of making excuses for why my garden's that way, I remember Jesus just interrupting me in this encounter and saying, It's okay. Just walk with me and let my father handle your garden. He's an excellent vine dresser. Man, that encounter shook me to the core. Every day after that, he came to walk with me. And I started noticing as I would go into more encounters that the flaws of my vineyard were becoming irrelevant and things were starting to bud and sprout. But I hadn't done a thing other than take a walk with the Good Shepherd. Guys, those walks were about one thing: convincing me of Abba's love for me, of Christ's love for me. And I want you to know that was the most uncomfortable thing I had ever experienced. Like sometimes I'd tell that story and cry. And sometimes I'd tell that story and go, if you only knew just how uncomfortable that whole thing was of learning as a man how to become a bride. Because every time he would speak over me of who he thought I really was, I would meet him with another reason why he should reconsider. I was just like the Shulamite in Song of Songs, chapter one, verse five. Jerusalem maidens in this twilight darkness. I know I'm so unworthy and so in need. You know what the bridegroom king says to her? Yet you're so lovely. Guys, I didn't know what to do with that. If you grew up like I did in a Pentecostal tradition, you were conditioned by preachers who taught you to see the sin within. We were experts in the fall of man, convinced of God's pleasure over us as a failing Christian or creation, I should say, failing Christian too. But that's not the Jesus that I met. That's not the bridegroom king that I met in the Song of Songs. The shepherd king refused to agree with her self-accusations. And I realized the shepherd king refused to agree with my self-accusations. And one day I remember just sitting there thinking about all the things that I needed to fix in my life. And he interrupted my pity with a thundering statement: You will never talk me out of loving you. In that moment, the tears begin to flow for hours, wave after wave of the love of God came crashing into my world. And I knew right then I'd never be able to win that argument with Jesus. He loves me for me. He loves you for you, not for what I do for him or not for what you do for him, not for how much you produce, not for how clean your vineyard looks, just you. And I want you to hear me say this because you need it. You will never talk him out of loving you either. Okay. So now I want to teach you something because here's where most people get it wrong. Like we think rest is something that we do after we've finished all the other important things. We think rest is a reward for productivity. We think rest is what you do at the end of a long week, on a vacation, in retirement. But that's not what the scriptures teach. Matter of fact, if you go over and look at Hebrews chapter four, the writer tells us to strive for one specific thing: rest. Strive for rest? That makes sense. It almost seems contradictory. Um, but the reality is what's really being said here is if there's one thing worth using your effort to attain, use it to pursue the rest God has already provided for you. Friend, I want to say something to you. Rest is not optional, rest is not a luxury. Rest is a mighty tool in the process of growth and maturity. In fact, rest is an act of worship. If you just look at the life of Jesus, Jesus had a lifestyle of rest despite all of the activity in his life. He modeled spiritual rest by being alone with his father often. He took early morning times for prayer. He slept through storms, he called his disciples away for times of rest, as he wasn't running in reaction to the chaos of his day. He wasn't pulled into the urgency of every hour. If that were true, Lazarus would never have been dead for four days. Jesus would not have slept through a storm. He would have selected more disciples. But friend, Jesus is our blueprint for the life of rest. And Matthew 11 28, one of the most powerful invitations in all of Scripture says this Come to me, get away with me. And you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. This is in the message translation. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. Friend, pay attention to that language. Unforced rhythms. That's what I had never learned. My rhythms were all forced, pressure driven, expectation-driven, performance-driven. And Jesus was inviting me into a different way, a ray, a way, not in what I could produce, but in who he is. So I want to take you into one more story before we close, because I think it's I think it really holds a key to everything that we've been talking about. I know everybody knows the story of Noah, but I want it, I want you to hear something that you may have missed. So in the days of Noah, the world was operating in full chaos. People were eating and drinking and being merry and the earth, but then on the flip side, the earth was filled with violence and injustice. Humanity had become wicked to the point that all they thought about, the scripture says, was doing evil. Sound familiar? And in the middle of all that chaos, God had a plan. He called a man named Noah. And here's the thing that most people skip over. In Hebrew, the name Noah means rest. God called a man named rest and gave him the blueprints that would save the world. And this is not primarily a story about Noah, it's a story about what Noah found. So if you go into Genesis chapter 6, verse 8, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. In the middle of a world of chaos and wickedness, one man lifted his eyes high enough to find grace. And that place of intimate rest with God birthed the blueprints to save the human race. Guys, I believe that's still the assignment today. The world doesn't need more reactionary leaders. The world doesn't need more people scrolling headlines, reposting outrage, and performing solutions that aren't rooted in anything real. The world needs leaders who have found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Leaders who are so rooted in rest that they can build with eternal blueprints. Even when the flood waters are rising, that's what we're building here. That's what this is about. That season for me of the fall of 2016 by the fire, that season of walking with the shepherd, that season of learning what rest actually was, it wasn't just a breaking point. It was an invitation. And out of, and and guys, I can say this honestly out of that invitation, the shepherd's tent was born. Song of Songs, uh, chapter one, verse eight says, Listen, my radiant one. If you ever lose sight of me, just follow in my footsteps where I lead my lovers. Come with your burdens and cares. Come to the place near the sanctuary of my shepherds. That's the shepherd's tent. It's a place for those who feel unworthy and dark and dry. It's a place of healing, not harshness. It's a place where you can find the pace of peace and where interior gardens can once again flourish. This is the place where colorless, exhausted Shulamites once again become radiant brides. It's a place absent of the busyness of Babylon. So you can get rooted in a life of rest and peace. The shepherd's tent is not just a podcast. It wasn't just a church that we launched in Covington, Georgia years ago. It's a posture, it's a way of living, it's a declaration that you are done being driven and you're ready to be restored and led by Holy Spirit. A place where you don't have to perform, a place where you can bring your whole self and remember who you are. And I want to end this podcast today with this. And I and I hope this will really uh hit you hard. And I pray that you'll let this land. Ephesians chapter 3, verse 17 says, then by constantly using your faith, the life of Christ will be released deep inside you. And the resting place of his love will become the very source and root of your life. Guys, the resting place of his love, not the striving place, not the performing place, but the resting place. Friend, true rest begins when we are so convinced of his love that we no longer question his care. You can be absolutely confident that he cares about whatever you're going through. He cares about your health, he cares about your finances, he cares about your family, he cares about your business, he cares about your calling. Matthew 10, 29 says he knows when even a single sparrow falls, aren't you worth much more to God than many sparrows? So don't worry, for your father cares deeply about even the smallest detail of your life. And look, I know some of you carrying an image that makes that hard to believe. I did too. I was raised for to look at a God that was bloodthirsty, lightning bolts in his hand that looked like more like Zeus than Christ. I was raised to know God as one ready to strike down sinners, a God who was pleased when I was producing and silent when I was struggling. But that is not the God of Scripture. Lamentations chapter 3, verse 22 says this the faithful love of the Lord never ends. His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness, his mercies begin afresh each morning. Every morning, guys. Not when you've earned it, not when your vineyard is presentable, every single morning, Abba cares for you. And when you really believe that, everything begins to change. Now, before we close, I want to speak to those of you who feel this deeply. If this message resonates with you, if you know leaders who need this, I want to invite you to help us build the shepherd's tent. It's not just a podcast, it's a place of restoration for leaders. A message like this should only spread when people decide that they matter. So if you feel led, I want you, I want to ask you to partner with us. Whether it's$5,$500, it doesn't matter. Everything helps. Partner with us at markcasto.co backslash donate and help us reach more leaders who need a place to rest. Again, that's marcesto.co backslash donate. You can find the link for everything that I'm talking about below in the description. Okay. Now I want to leave you with something. A declaration for every leader listening right now who's tired, for everyone who's been grinding in a pace that was never sustainable, for the pastor who's preaching fire on Sunday and falling apart on Monday, for the entrepreneurs who's scaling the business, but you're losing your marriage. For the ministry leader who answers every call but can't remember the last time they heard God for themselves. I want to say this clearly to you. You don't need to do more. You don't need to carry more. You don't have to prove anything. You need a place to return. Because rest isn't running away from your calling. Rest is the place that your calling flows from. Psalm 23, verse 2 through 3 says, He offers a resting place for me in his luxurious love. His tracks take me to an oasis of peace near the quiet brook of bliss. That's where he restores and revives my life. Not where he drives you, that's where he leads you. And maybe this is your moment to slow down, to take an honest look at your life, to ask yourself, where have I been carrying too much? Where have I been moving too fast? Where have I lost myself? What is my vineyard within saying right now? And if this hit you, don't just move on. Don't let the next episode, the next post, the next task bury this moment. I want you to reach out to me. Send me a message on Facebook. You can email me at mark at markcasto.co. You can find me on Instagram at Markcasto underscore. Friend, I want to hear your story because you're not the only one feeling this and you don't have to carry it alone. The Shepherd King is still extending his hand, still saying, come take a walk with me. Still not concerned with the condition of your vineyard, but he is interested in your presence. And he's more interested in your yes to intimacy than your productivity. God bless you guys. Thank you for joining us of this episode of The Shepherd Stent. God bless you.